Chapter 629: Dire Tidings

On the highlands of Xianyang, official carriages and palanquins streamed in an unbroken line.

This was a sight rarely seen in a war zone.

The Marshal Manor's decrees had spread through every corner of Xi'an Prefecture by way of rumor, stirring up a great storm of unrest in the prefecture's countryside.

On the official road from Wugong County toward Xianyang, a mighty procession of carts and horses was advancing.

At the very center of the procession was an official palanquin with a silver finial and black canopy, borne by eight servants; yamen runners and mounted constables cleared the way ahead, while a dozen or so provincial graduates, licentiates, and sons of officials rode alongside and behind the palanquin, and at the tail of the procession followed several merchants who had purchased official cap and sash.

The occupant of this palanquin, decked out in the regalia of a third-rank official, was Ma Mingshi, a retired official of Wugong County.

He had placed in the third class of the metropolitan examination in the forty-fourth year of the Wanli reign, the same year as Hong Chengchou and Chen Qiyu; he had risen from magistrate of Hongdong to Vice Minister of Revenue, and was now the highest-ranking official from Wugong.

Beside the palanquin, the provincial graduate Zhang Wenxi rode along looking deeply troubled; after mulling it over, he finally asked toward the palanquin, "Has the Xiuxu elder heard that the Grand Marshal of the Marshal Manor wants us to buy back our own farmland?"

Inside the palanquin, Ma Mingshi had been lost in thought; hearing the question from outside, he lifted the curtain and glanced out before replying, "Ah, Wenxi. I have heard. Rumors are not to be trusted."

Riding nearby, Kang Wanmin, a new third-class metropolitan graduate of the previous year, laughed and said, "The venerable elder is absolutely right. This student thought the same — if he could just take it outright, why bother with such a foolish scheme of making people buy back their own land?"

At these words, the provincial graduates and licentiates around the palanquin all chimed in with agreement.

Zhang Wenxi asked again, "Then why would such a rumor spread, and with such convincing detail?"

Inside the official palanquin, Ma Mingshi slowly shook his head and said, "I'm afraid that is a question to ask Chen Yuxuan in the city of Xi'an Prefecture."

He was referring to Chen Qiyu.

Ma Mingshi believed that this rumor about buying back farmland had been deliberately set loose by Chen Qiyu in the city of Xi'an Prefecture to smear the Marshal Manor.

The gentry of Wugong County held a relatively favorable view of the Marshal Manor, and that was because of two men: one was Mo Yujing, the other Zu Kuan.

These gentry really had, at the very first moment the Marshal's army advanced east into Guanzhong, formed militia and gone out of the city to resist the Marshal's army.

The leader at the time was a licentiate named Han Shi; every wealthy and powerful household in the county sent men, providing their own horses and weapons, and followed Han Shi outside the city to fight a battle against Mo Yujing.

Within a single shichen, Han Shi lay dead in the battle lines, the militia collapsed, and then the Mongol soldiers under Mo Yujing's command chased the routed troops straight into the city, seized the defenses of Wugong, and declared the complete defeat of Wugong County's landlord forces.

Ma Mingshi, too, had a grandnephew of his clan die outside the city.

By all rights, they should have hated the Marshal's army and longed for the Ming army to fight its way back.

But what happened afterward defied the imagination of the Wugong gentry... Zu Kuan simply went and plundered the neighboring Xingping County.

Even now, at the home of the metropolitan graduate Kang Wanmin, there was still a provincial graduate from Xingping County named Liu Zhu in hiding; over seventy members of his household had been killed resisting the pillaging.

Yet in Wugong County, which Mo Yujing had occupied, only the militia had clashed with Mo Yujing's troops outside the city; beyond that, when the tribal soldiers under his command entered the city, they were more disciplined than government troops, and the worst thing they ever did was let their horses graze outside the city and trample some grave mounds.

By comparison, people felt that it was actually rather fine if the Ming army never fought its way back.

What was even more surprising was that Mo Yujing did not garrison his troops in Wugong County for long, and soon left for Fengxiang Prefecture.

At that time, Ma Mingshi and the others were even a little afraid — without the Marshal Manor's protection, Wugong County had better not attract the Ming army.

But this was actually a misunderstanding; the discipline of Mo Yujing's troops was a special case. They were the most disciplined battalion troops in the entire eastern expeditionary force, bar none.

Under the reward-and-punishment framework of the current Marshal's Code, they possessed a mature set of plundering drill regulations.

After all, Liu Chengzong's army was a force of professionals who could even tidy up the bricks of a leveled city and would tear down five walls just to move two canopy beds.

The efficiency of organized plundering could leave the Ming army, with its chaotic private looting, burning, and grabbing, eight blocks behind.

It was just that the Mongol soldiers under Mo Yujing's command had a relatively low level of education and lacked experience living in Han lands; they lacked a correct understanding of the value of loot and were rather rough in their methods, so when they plundered, they could not do the job as meticulously and beautifully as the other field battalions.

So Mo Yujing simply gave no order.

After all, he did not want his subordinates smashing every jar and pot, burning calligraphy, paintings, and timber, and then coming out each carrying a load of iron woks on their shoulders and in their arms.

Professional matters were best left to the professionals.

This spectacle of tribal soldiers doing no harm whatsoever to the local area prompted the gentry of Wugong County, upon receiving Liu Chengzong's invitation, to be willing to travel to Xianyang for the banquet and see just what Liu Chengzong was thinking.

Similar scenes were unfolding on the official roads from every county of Xi'an Prefecture to Xianyang, though the gentry from other places did not show nearly as much enthusiasm as those of Wugong County.

The vast majority of people who received the invitation dared neither to come nor to refuse, so they discussed it within their clans and dispatched suitable individuals to attend.

There were also some who were timid yet resourceful; faced with a policy from above, they had a countermeasure from below — they had already divided their households and land with their clansmen at home.

This could also be considered keeping the fat water from flowing into outsiders' fields.

Even more people chose to stay where they were and wait for news of the Xianyang banquet, to see what the Marshal Manor was really planning.

What ill intentions could Liu Chengzong possibly have?

He was merely calculating that since these gentry were already on their way to Xianyang, he would issue orders to draw eight thousand men from each battalion, and at the same time select nineteen Colonels, thirty-eight Commandants, and one hundred and fourteen Elite Riders from the Tiger Guard Battalion.

"One Colonel with two Commandants and six Elite Riders, carrying proclamation documents, will proceed to the six subprefectures and thirteen counties of Xi'an Prefecture. A county seat will dispatch three hundred troops, a subprefecture seat five hundred troops. Find a way to enter the city."

Liu Chengzong looked at these mid-ranking officers, the Marshal Manor's finest, and gave the order: "If you can enter the city, then take over the city defenses and carry out the work of registering the population and surveying the farmland."

"If you cannot enter, then come back and call for reinforcements."

Having said this, and after the men acknowledged the order, Liu Chengzong then said with a beaming smile, "Of course, it is best if we can avoid assaulting the city. Harmony is to be valued."

Liu the Lion was not afraid of assaulting cities.

He had already ordered Mi Layin to mine ore in the mountainous areas around Yaozhou and Qianzhou, and at the same time ordered the Xianyang magistrate Zhao Jichang to establish kilns, conscript civilian laborers, and assign them to the artillery commanders of the three great battalions to build blast furnaces on the northern bank of the Wei River.

Casting cannons right before the battle.

Besieging the city of Xi'an Prefecture would inevitably require bombarding the battlements, and the thousand-jin field bronze cannons currently with the army were not impressive enough for a siege campaign.

After all, Xi'an Prefecture had a moat, so methods like blowing up the city were not easy to use; if they had heavy cannons, it might be possible to collapse the thinner upper half of the city wall, creating a few gentle slopes that would be easy to climb.

For this, he needed siege-grade heavy cannons of over three thousand jin; if any subprefecture or county in Xi'an Prefecture was unwilling to be taken over, dragging a dozen or so cannons over with a few hundred oxen would work just as well.

It was just that Liu Chengzong believed that all of Shaanxi was waiting to be rebuilt, and the heavy work of post-war reconstruction required a great deal of manpower, so it was best to avoid fighting over the small surrounding counties if possible; one more person meant one more productive force, and there would always be a place they could be used.

After arranging this matter, Liu Chengzong had not rested long before a personal guard came to report that the Marshal Manor's cartographer, Monk Xue, had returned.

Monk Xue was travel-worn, accompanied by two apprentices from the New City Academy; the three of them came in with their arms full of scrolls, and as soon as they entered, he announced jubilantly, "Grand Marshal, Vice General Wei's troops have built an earthen mound on White Deer Plain; using a telescope, we can just barely overlook the prefectural city. The layout of the city walls has been drawn!"

"Well done! Did you see the walls?"

Liu Chengzong's words had barely left his mouth when Monk Xue said, "Vice General Wei is right behind."

Soon, Wei Qian'er also returned, his expression somewhat complicated. Entering the tent, he saluted Liu Chengzong and said, "Grand Marshal, the city of Xi'an Prefecture will not be easy to take."

"How so?"

Wei Qian'er drew a notebook of his own from inside his robes and said as he handed it over, "Xi'an has a moat. The city wall is twenty-three li around, four zhang high, four zhang thick at the top, and five zhang thick at the base. The corners, ramps, bastions, and reinforcing works — our cannons…"

As he reached the end, Wei Qian'er's expression turned a little odd.

It was obvious: against a giant fortress like this, even the heaviest cannon would struggle to blast it open.

Rammed-earth walls over a dozen meters thick, faced with grey brick — what difference was there between this thing and a mountain?

Liu Chengzong leafed through the sketches, pondered a moment, then spoke. "Then we'll cast the thousand-catty cannons outside the city… Ninety-eight enemy platforms?"

The map of Xi'an Prefecture that Monk Xue had brought back was exquisitely drawn, but what it depicted was an enormous war machine in its entirety.

On all four sides of the wall, at intervals of less than a hundred paces, a projecting enemy platform jutted out, and atop each platform stood an enemy tower — fully capable of bringing the far bank of the moat, several dozen paces away, within firing range.

This unquestionably made storming the city more difficult.

Anyone facing such city walls, launching a frontal assault, would not meet a good end.

Liu Chengzong likewise had no great solution. Apart from methods hard to pull off — starving them out or colluding with someone inside — the only option was to use cannon fire to destroy the enemy platforms, battlements, and gate towers, pound them until no one could stand on the walls, then swarm up with scaling ladders and seize the ramparts.

Yet given the scale of Xi'an Prefecture, an offensive that massive would drive ammunition consumption to a terrifying figure — even the cannons themselves would become expendable items.

Fortunately, Liu Chengzong did not feel his side lacked gunpowder.

The Marshal's headquarters' gunpowder reserves were very small compared to the Great Ming's. Each year, only Kangning Prefecture, in lieu of taxes, shipped sixty to seventy thousand catties of gunpowder to Xining.

Of course, if one looked at that figure in a global context, it was actually not small at all. Over a hundred years later, during the American War of Independence, the thirteen colonies of North America had an annual gunpowder output at roughly that level.

But the reason the Marshal's headquarters only shipped sixty to seventy thousand catties of gunpowder from Kangning Prefecture to Xining Prefecture each year was simply that, without a full-scale war, stockpiling that much gunpowder was useless.

Kangning Prefecture's saltpeter came from cave deposits. Each cave could be boiled and refined to yield a few thousand catties. The production was somewhat laborious, but transport was very easy — load it onto yak carts and follow the official road, with post stations all along the way, and it could be delivered straight to Xining Prefecture.

The earth saltpeter scattered across the arid zones, however, was simple to produce but troublesome to transport.

Take the saltpeter mines at Golmud, Hami, and Dunhuang, for example. They had been discovered, and production was indeed easy, but gathering manpower to extract a batch now and then was doable — sustained extraction was difficult.

Because to transport these materials on a sustained basis, one would have to specially build roads, establish post stations, and dig wells across the Gobi. Yet if one did all that — let alone Liu Chengzong's Marshal's headquarters — even all the wars in the entire world combined could not consume that much saltpeter.

So when the Marshal's headquarters had no war, they simply did not mine it.

After all, saltpeter, once mined and processed, ought to be used. Storing it unused risked moisture damage and waste.

And it absolutely could not be made directly into gunpowder in large quantities. In this era, black powder was, in the vast majority of cases, produced in concentrated batches according to need.

Moreover, the so-called optimal gunpowder ratio of seventy-five, ten, fifteen did not exist.

Because saltpeter could reach extremely high purity through traditional refining processes, and sulfur could as well — but charcoal could not.

Different woods produced charcoal of varying purity when smothered. Using the same ratio to make powder in different places, when the powder was gathered for use, all you got was a heap of gunpowder with inconsistent power.

What was more, gunpowder still had to be ground, corned, and sorted into fast-burning priming powder, slow-burning large-grain propellant, and fast-burning small-grain bursting powder.

And the actual user faced an even more complicated situation.

For instance, the saltpeter that reached their hands might be insufficiently refined, forcing them to increase its proportion to eighty percent or even higher.

Or the gunpowder ingredients might be flawless, but the weapon using the powder had problems — no one dared load a Hongwu-era old cannon with gunpowder at its optimal power.

Therefore, in peacetime, collecting saltpeter in Qinghai, Hami, and other places was an awkward matter for the Marshal's headquarters, where the input exceeded the output.

Once war broke out, however, that was a different story.

Liu Chengzong understood perfectly: against a solid giant fortress like Xi'an, nothing short of an astronomical amount of gunpowder could breach the city.

So he immediately made two-pronged preparations. On one hand, he ordered Yao Subprefecture, Qian Subprefecture, and other places to collect copper and iron, open kilns to cast cannons and cannonballs. On the other, he sent word to Lanzhou, ordering Qinghai to collect saltpeter earth and ship it to Qinghai Lake, where Xining Prefecture would boil and refine the saltpeter earth at the lake.

For refining saltpeter earth, clean water was crucial.

Xining Prefecture was uniquely blessed. The army could use snowmelt from the Qilian Mountains to refine the finest horse-tooth saltpeter.

In any case, after smashing the Ming court's heavy troop concentrations in Shaanxi, Liu Chengzong already regarded the entire province as something already in his pocket.

Neither the Xi'an Prefecture seat before his eyes, nor the twenty thousand men under Regional Commander Hou Liangzhu on the Sichuan border, nor the Ming deserters running rampant all across Shaanxi — none of them could stop him from taking Shaanxi.

The most important thing right now was not whether Xi'an Prefecture could be quickly breached, but whether the Marshal's Army could complete tax collection in Xi'an Prefecture.

That one Chang'an County attached to the prefectural seat was utterly insignificant compared to the six subprefectures and thirteen counties of the entire Xi'an Prefecture.

But just as Liu the Lion thought everything was slowly turning for the better, misfortune quietly descended upon this land.

He received a warning letter from Yang Qi in Monan.

The letter said that this year's fighting in Monan had ended. Dorgon's Later Jin army had failed to gain any advantage in the Ordos, and in his fury, he had launched a fierce assault on Guihua City, scaring Yang Qi half to death.

Fortunately, Yang Qi had no shortage of defending troops, and the Ming court's Shanxi border army had successfully sortied beyond the border, prompting Dorgon to withdraw eastward. Yang Qi had successfully held Monan for Liu Chengzong.

But while the land was held, soon there might not be many living people left on it.

With the Shanxi border army's sortie, plague had broken out in Ulanqab and Datong, both inside and outside the border walls, and was spreading to surrounding areas as the troops moved.

Fortunately, the plague progressed with extreme virulence. The lands beyond the border were vast and sparsely populated; most of the infected fell ill at dawn and were dead by dusk. No sooner had Yang Qi received word of the plague than, aside from those who had died of it, he could see no further trace of the disease.

Yang Qi had sent word precisely to warn Liu Chengzong that this plague had erupted inside and outside the border walls, with Liaozhou and Zezhou in Shanxi hit hardest.

If it spread beyond Shanxi — if it reached Yan'an Prefecture, that would still be manageable, but if it spread into Henan or Xi'an Prefecture, then the plague would not be the kind that flared up and vanished in an instant.

Liu Chengzong had just finished reading Yang Qi's letter when Wei Qian'er's soldiers burst through the door.

"Urgent report, Grand Marshal! Tong Pass! Tong Pass has broken out with the lump plague! The Ming troops have charged out and clashed several times, and now Regional Commander Wei's main camp is infected too. Morale is crumbling, the soldiers are clamoring — mutiny is imminent!"